Democracy means rule of the people. The Gilens-Page study of 1779 legislative initiatives in 1981-2002 showed that chances of success were strongly correlated with the desires of the affluent, but not at all with average citizens.

For example, polls show z majority of Americans want Wall Street banks to be brought under control, according to Martin Gillens, a co-author of the city. They want a higher minimum wage, better unemployment benefits and more spending on education. On the other hand, they are less supportive of abortion rights and gay marriage than the economic elite. But the political system follows the economic elite, not them.

In other words, the United States is a democracy in that we have freedom of speech and contested elections, but in terms of outcomes, we are an oligarchy, ruled by the rich.

This is not an accident, a matter of how things happen to play out. It is the result of a deliberate campaign that has been going on for decades. It is not something that began with Donald Trump and it will not end when he is out of office.

The anti-democratic movement has three elements:
• Use the power of money to dominate political discourse.
• Use the power of money to dominate politics and government
• Restrict the right to vote and other democratic rights..

I recently read a good book, DARING DEMOCRACYby Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet, and a young friend, Adam Eichen, that ties all this together.

I do have a few reservations about it, particularly the fact that they let Democrats off too nightly, which I’ll get to at the end. But I’ll first summarize their main contentions.

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The famous Powell Memo—written in1971 by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—called on U.S. business to mobilize to counteract anti-business sentiment in the news media and the educational system.

Right-wing billionaires responded by funding the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing think tanks.

They of course have a perfect right to present their point of view. The problem was that these organizations are dedicated to political warfare, and get to be treated as equivalent to groups who, whatever their unconscious biases, are serious scholars and researchers..

When I was a newspaper reporter, and had to write about something I didn’t know much about, the first thing I’d do was phone experts on various sides of the issue.

When I phoned the Brookings Institution, the person I’d reach would give me a carefully worded opinion, quoting sources and taking into account arguments on both sides.

When I phoned the Heritage Foundation, I’d talk to some young guy who had talking points down pat, but couldn’t back them up. Yet by the rules of my game, I had to treat them as equal authorities.

The Cato Institute, funded by the Koch brothers, consisted of sincere libertarians, who sometimes came down on the side of peace and civil liberties. But when their views closed with corporate interests, the Koch brothers purged the staff.

Brooke Gladstone, in her new book, The Trouble With Reality: A Rumination on the Moral Panic of Our Time, claimed that the election of Donald Trump reflects fundamental flaws in human nature and in the very ideas of democracy, free speech and freedom of the press.

Brooke Gladstone

To her credit, she doesn’t take her argument to its logical conclusion, which would be to empower gatekeepers to filter the news and opinions available so the rest of us aren’t exposed to anything the gatekeepers consider fake.

Many others, in fact, do go that far, so I will try to sum up her argument and then engage it. Here’s her argument:

Truth is subjective. Everybody lives in their own unique reality. Since our ability to understand is limited, we make decisions based on stereotypes. All human beings are emotionally committed to stereotypes and experimental psychology shows that our brains react negatively to whatever challenges our stereotype.

Knowledge of facts is not enough. Any given set of facts is subject to multiple interpretations. We the people filter facts according to own various assumptions and biases.

Appealing lies beat inconvenient truths. John Milton, Thomas Jefferson and John Stuart Mill claimed defended free speech by claiming that truth would defeat falsehood in a free and open encounter. This is bogus. We the people don’t have access to full information about important public issues, nor the time or ability to evaluate it if we did.

Democracies foster demagogues. Since we the people cannot make rational decisions, we tend to prefer demagogues who offer us appealing fantasies rather than intellectuals who tell us inconvenient truths.

Here’s my answer.

The expression that “truth is subjective” or “we all live in different realities” is highly pernicious.

It’s true that we all have our own unique experience of reality. As Gladstone notes, humans can’t imagine what it is like to experience the world as a bat or a bloodhound does. But a human, a bat and a bloodhound all live in the same actual world. We are all burned by fire and drown in water. If our perceived reality is wrong, the real reality will sooner or later catch up with us.

What is democracy? Does democracy consist of free elections? Is democracy based on inalienable human rights? Is a democracy a government of laws and not of men? Does democracy require political parties, checks and balances and separation of church and state?

The classicist Paul Cartledge pointed out in his new book, DEMOCRACY: A Life (2016), that ancient Athens and the other Greek city-states lacked all these things. Yet, he argued, it was they who best represented the ideal of democracy and we Americans and British who have fallen away from it.

Democracy in ancient Greece had a complicated history. Cartledge derived from the fragmentary historical record how the common people over time wrested power from kings, aristocrats and the rich.

At the high tide of democracy, the main governing bodies were Assemblies were chosen at random, by lot, as juries are today.

The Athenian Assembly had a membership of up to 5,000 to 6,000, chosen from a citizenry of about 30,000, and they all met for important decisions.

The Assembly met almost continuously; it passed laws, set policy, tried important legal cases and decided on whether to exile (ostracize) troublesome citizens and politicians.

The Assembly did elect an administrative Council of 500 as well as generals and treasurers. Other governmental positions, including juries for minor cases, were chosen by lot.

There was no bright line dividing the legislative, executive and judicial function. An Athenian citizen might propose a military action in the Assembly one day and be named to command the troops to carry out that action.

There was virtually no limit to the power of the Assembly. You could call it a tyranny of the majority. You could even call it a dictatorship of the proletariat.

But you couldn’t deny that the people of Athens and the other democratic Greek cities ruled themselves in a way that contemporary Americans and Britishers don’t come close to doing.

Aristotle defined democracy as the rule of the poor (meaning workers) and oligarchy as the rule of the rich (meaning property-owners who don’t do manual labor). Any Athenian in the time of Pericles would call the modern USA and UK oligarchies, based on the influence of the rich on public policy and the lack of participation by the mass of the citizenry.

The defeat of the odious Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement shows that the people can win against entrenched corporate and political power. The way the TPP was defeated shows how the people can win against entrenched power.

A couple of years ago, the passage of the odious Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement seemed inevitable.

Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Republican leaders in Congress, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and most big newspapers and broadcasters were in favor of it. The public knew little about it because it was literally classified as secret. Congress passed fast-track authority, so that it could be pushed through without time for discussion.

It is in theory a free-trade agreement among the United States, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Japan and seven other countries. It is actually a corporate wish list in the form of international law, giving corporations new privileges in the form of patent and copyright protection and new powers to challenge environmental, health and labor laws and regulations.

I think that the United States and other Western countries are in a political and economic crisis.

I think that political leaders in the Western world must answer these questions.

Does the economic and political crisis mean that the system has failed?

If the system has failed, is this a failure of capitalism, a failure of democracy or both?

If the failure is a failure of capitalism, can the capitalistic system be fixed, or must it be replaced?

If the failure is a failure of democracy, can the democratic system be fixed, or is it doomed?

I don’t expect these questions to be addressed this year or the next, but I don’t think they can be evaded indefinitely. I think there will be some sort of resolution, for good or for ill, within the next 10 years.

When people tell me “this is a Republic, not a democracy,” my first question is who they think is entitled to rule over them.

I like the following observation by Kevin Drum of Mother Jones:

It’s true that humans are hairless primates who naturally gravitate to a hierarchical society, but there’s little evidence that “most humans” prefer non-democratic societies. There’s loads of evidence that powerful elites prefer elite-driven societies, and have gone to great lengths throughout history to maintain them against the masses. Whether the masses themselves ever thought this was a good arrangement is pretty much impossible to say.

Of course, once the technologies of communication, transportation, and weaponry became cheaper and more democratized, it turned out the masses were surprisingly hostile to elite rule and weren’t afraid to show it. So perhaps it’s not so impossible to say after all.

In fact, most humans throughout history probably haven’t favored “meritocratic” rule, but mostly had no practical way to show it except in small, usually failed rebellions. The Industrial Revolution changed all that, and suddenly the toiling masses had the technology to make a decent showing against their overlords. Given a real option, it turned out they nearly all preferred some form of democracy after all.

Which brings us to the real purpose of democracy: to rein in the rich and powerful. Without democracy, societies very quickly turn into the Stanford Prison Experiment. With it, that mostly doesn’t happen.

That’s a huge benefit, even without counting free speech, fair trials, and all the other gewgaws of democracy. It is, so far, the only known social construct that reliably keeps powerful elites from becoming complete jackasses. That’s pretty handy.

I was taught as a boy that famines in countries such as India and China were caused by overpopulation. But there are more than twice as many people in both countries now than there were then, and yet they are better fed—perhaps I should say less malnourished.

I learned from Amartya Sen, winner of the Nobel memorial prize in economics, that the true cause of famine in modern times is poverty and autocracy.

No rich person in India or China ever starved to death, nor did any governmental official. People went hungry because they lacked the means to buy food, and they lacked a political voice to make government respond to their distress.

Here’s how Amartya Sen put it in a 2011 interview.

… Famines have actually not occurred in functioning democracies and … … there was a good reason for it. My first book on the subject, Poverty and Famines, came out in 1981, and by then I understood something about how famines operate and how easy it is to prevent them. You can’t prevent undernourishment so easily, but famines you can stop with half an effort. Then the question was why dont the governments stop them?

The first answer is that the government servants and the leaders are upper class. They never starve. They never suffer from famine, and therefore they don’t have a personal incentive to stop it.

Second, if the government is vulnerable to public opinion, then famines are a dreadfully bad thing to have. You can’t win many elections after a famine, and you dont like being criticized by newspapers, opposition parties in parliament, and so on. Democracy gives the government an immediate political incentive to act.

Famines occur under a colonial administration, like the British Raj in India or for that matter in Ireland, or under military dictators in one country after another, like Somalia and Ethiopia, or in one-party states like the Soviet Union and China.

Lee Kuan Yew, who died last Monday, was one of the world’s most successful rulers. I am uneasy about his success because it was based on rejection of American-type ideas of democracy and individual freedom.

Under Lee’s 50 years of formal and informal rule, Singapore went from being a Third World backwater with no natural resources to a gleaming technopolis and the world’s third major financial hub after London and New York. GDP per capita increased by several orders of magnitude.

It refuted the modern idea, or rather dogma, that democracy and individual liberties are indispensable components of economic modernization.

A clever foreign policy enabled great relations with both the US and China. Visible corruption is all but non-existent; the story might be apocryphal, but apparently Lee once even went as far as allowing the execution of a friend for stealing from the state.

Lee was a proponent of so-called “Asian values” of hierarchy, obedience and discipline, which I don’t think of as being uniquely Asian. They could just as easily be called Prussian values.

When I was younger, I thought American ideals were validated by the fact that, in the USA, the common people had a better life than they did almost anywhere else, and that things worked better than they did almost anywhere else. Now, as I look at the dysfunctional American government and predatory American corporations, I have to wonder.

The Kurdish Freedom Movement, based on three towns in northern Syria fighting for survival against the totalitarian ISIS, has created a radically democratic society based on feminism, environmentalism and community democracy.

Malcolm Harris, writing for Talking Points Memo, described what seems like an anarchist utopia which is, at the same time, an effective self-defense force.

Neighborhoods have peace committees to resolve disputes without the threat of jail. Women’s councils enforce ostracism for spousal abuse. A children’s council designed a playground in one community.

These three communities, which comprise 4 million people, half of them refugees from the Syrian civil war or the ISIS occupation, follow the philosophy of “non-state political administration” or “democracy without a state” promulgated by Abdullah Ocalan, a Kurdish leader now serving a life sentence in a Turkish prison.

The KFM rejects capitalism, top-down government and male supremacy. Decision-making is pushed down to existing community organizations. Reportedly this is highly efficient, because it does away with the need for bureaucracy.

The Kurds in Iraqi Kurdistan are admirable in that they are democratic and they give refuge to people of different religions and ethnicities fleeing ISIS perscution. The KFM in Syria goes further, in rejecting ethnic nationalism altogether and demanding only self-government.

I have long disagreed with friends who say that there is something about the Muslim religion or Middle Eastern culture that is inherently incompatible with freedom and democracy.

Abdullah Ocalan is a leader and thinker who not only believes in freedom and democracy, but could give us Americans lessons in how to practice it.

Although I had misgivings that the U.S. rationale for invading Iraq in 2003 was based on lies, I thought the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was a good thing, not a bad thing.

He had massacred his own people, the Kurdish people in the north and the Marsh Arabs in the south. I felt ashamed that the U.S. government in 1991 called upon these people to rise up against Saddam and then left them to their fate. I thought the invasion could be a way of making things right.

One thing that stuck in my mind is that Saddam issued an edict that those who insulted him or his sons would have their tongues cut out. Amnesty International tracked down someone who suffered that fate. Surely, I thought, nothing could be worse than such a tyrant’s rule.

But I was wrong. The people of Iraq are worse off now than they were under Saddam. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed in the fighting in Iraq, and some claim as much as a million. Nobody knows. There are a million Iraqi refugees. The age-old Christian community in Iraq is threatened with extinction.

There is something worse than the rule of an evil tyrant, and that is the collapse of governmental authority and, in extreme cases, the whole structure of society. When people are faced with chaos and unpredictable, uncontrollable killing, robbery and rape, they will turn to anybody that offers protection and order—even the Taliban in Afghanistan, even (perhaps) ISIS in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

==Winston Churchill, in a House of Commons speech on Nov. 11, 1947

The timing of this famous remark is significant. Churchill won the war, but in the election of July 1945, he was defeated. At the time I thought the public showed gross ingratitude, but I am willing to accept the interpretation that Churchill was not the man to organize the peace.

When the news came out, Churchill was taking a bath. Was there ever a statesman who spent more time in the bath? He remarked “They have a perfect right to kick me out. That is democracy”. When he was offered the Order of the Garter, he asked “Why should I accept the Order of the Garter, when the British people have just given me the Order of the Boot?”.

He returned to power in 1951. The remark about democracy was made when he had lost power and had every reason to be bitter. Fortunately he kept his sense of humor even in the most trying circumstances.

I would like to see a world at peace, and I would like to see international institutions capable of settling disputes and addressing global problems such as climate change and nuclear arms. Unfortunately these are not the kinds of international institutions that we the people are being asked to support.

The most powerful global organizations, with the possible exception of the Roman Catholic church, are international banks and corporations. International institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank enforce rules that serve the interests of banks and corporations.

The proposed Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement and similar proposals would give the world’s corporate and financial elite new tools for enforcing their agendas. While there is urgent need for international agreement and institutions to deal with climate change, TPP-type agreements actually would give corporations the right to appeal national laws and local rules aimed at limiting greenhouse gasses.

What makes the banks and corporations powerful is that money can go anywhere while most people are stuck where they are. Migrant money is treated with deference. Migrant Mexicans in the United States, migrant Uzbeks and Kazakhs in Russia, and migrant Filipinos in the Persian are treated like dirt.

The European Union’s current austerity program is an example. The well-being of Europe’s people is being sacrificed to ensure that Europe’s banks never suffer losses. I’d guess this is the main reason for the success of Europe’s nationalist right-wing parties in the recent elections to the European Parliament.

Nelson Mandela, who died last week, was mourned by many Americans as a hero. But there was a time when the American government regarded him as a terrorist.

Double click to enlarge

I agree with Newt Gingrich’s judgment.

Mandela was faced with a vicious apartheid regime that eliminated all rights for blacks and gave them no hope for the future. This was a regime which used secret police, prisons and military force to crush all efforts at seeking freedom by blacks.

What would you have done faced with that crushing government?

What would you do here in America if you had that kind of oppression?

Some of the people who are most opposed to oppression from Washington attack Mandela when he was opposed to oppression in his own country.

After years of preaching non-violence, using the political system, making his case as a defendant in court, Mandela resorted to violence against a government that was ruthless and violent in its suppression of free speech.

As Americans we celebrate the farmers at Lexington and Concord who used force to oppose British tyranny. We praise George Washington for spending eight years in the field fighting the British Army’s dictatorial assault on our freedom.

Patrick Henry said, “Give me liberty or give me death.”

Thomas Jefferson wrote and the Continental Congress adopted that “all men are created equal, and they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

When I studied political science in college nearly 60 years ago, we were taught to contrast the sensible, pragmatic American and British political cultures with the ideological, gridlocked French and Italians.

In France and Italy in the 1950s, governments fell and new governmental coalitions had to be formed every few months, or so it seemed, and the diverse political parties could never agree on policies to address their nations problems.

But I never heard of any French or Italian political party that tried to stop their governments from carrying out their lawful functions or paying their lawful bills, as happened during the past couple of weeks here in the United States. Today it is we Americans who set an example of ideological, gridlocked government.

Our Constitution sets up a legislative process that says enactment of a law requires agreement among a President elected by the nation, a House of Representatives elected by districts on a population basis and a Senate elected by states on a state sovereignty basis. That is a more complicated and difficult process than in most democratic governments. But now agreement among these three bodies is required merely to allow the government to carry out responsibilities mandated by law.

The Greek government has banned the xenophobic racist Golden Dawn party and arrested six members of Parliament who belong to that party. Greg Palast wrote that the real reason for the Golden Dawn’s ban is that it is the only Greek political party who opposes the austerity measure imposed by the European central bank. If you define fascism as the union of corporation and government, Palast said, then the Golden Dawn party is Greece’s only anti-fascist party. He predicted that Greek leftists will come to bitterly resent the precedent that has been set, because they will be next.

He quoted Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist for the World Bank, as saying that when the International Monetary Fund and World Bank impose austerity measures on Third World governments, they always insist that money be set aside for riot control. He said they even have an expression, the “IMF riot.”

Peace between Iran and the United States would be good for almost everybody except the Saudi Arabian royal family and maybe the government of Israel. Pepe Escobar explained why the Sandi Arabian government is threatened by a U.S.-Iran agreement and how it will use its leverage to prevent it.

A man on a San Francisco commuter train pulled out a .45 pistol and aimed it at fellow passengers. Nobody noticed until he actually shot someone because they were all focused on their hand-held phones and computers.

Touch screen voting machines can vulnerable to tampering by hackers. But California has enacted a new law that allows counties to use touch screen machines that have not been certified as reliable. This is a bad law and a bad precedent for other states. Why take a chance on tampering with voting results?

Two college professors who organized an FDA advisory panel on painkilling drugs charged big pharmaceutical companies $25,000 each to have their experts attend meetings. The money went to fund their research projects.

There’s nothing wrong with a government agency getting outside advice, including advice from drug companies, but it is wrong to charge for the right to give advice and with giving special privileges to big companies who can pay a fee.

A Canadian company registered in Delaware has appealed to a NAFTA tribunal to overturn Quebec’s mortatorium on hydraulic fracturing because it takes away expected profit. The moratorium is intended to give the Quebec government time to study the impact of fracking.

The proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement also would give international companies the right to appeal and possibly overturn national laws if it deprived them of privileges granted under the treaty.

It would be nice to show that a woman can be elected President, just as it was nice to show that an African-American can be elected President. But Hillary Clinton, like Barack Obama and like her husband Bill Clinton, represents the corporate and Wall Street establishment, not working people and young people.

A democratic system requires wisdom and maturity in the electorate and in elected and appointed government officials. The Economist reviewer considers two books that examine the past and future of democratic governance.

Another thing we Americans should take into account when criticizing the Egyptian political culture is that our government for decades has propped up an Egyptian dictatorship which has crushed a free press, independent civic organizations and the other institutions that make democracy possible.

Few despots are powerful enough to stamp out organized religion, so, when no other means are available, opposition to the dictator often takes a religious form. This was true of Iran under the Shah, it was true of Poland under the Communists.

I don’t say that Egypt would be a well-functioning democracy if only the U.S. hadn’t interfered. I don’t know enough to make a statement one way or the other. I do say the Egyptians and the other peoples of the Middle East would be better off if the U.S. government ceased interfering with their government and politics.

Anyhow, we Americans have a highly dysfunctional democracy ourselves, and no foreign power to blame it on..

The cartoon is by Joel Pett of the Lexington Herald-Leader. Hat tip to jobsanger.

Bruce Levine, a psychologist, wrote that many people are diagnosed as mentally ill simply because they question and rebel against authority. He thought one reason Americans are politically passive is that we are medicated out of our rebellious impulses.

Explorer Deborah Shapiro wrote about how she and her husband Rolf Bjelke got along for 15 months at an Antarctic research station, nine of them alone together, without driving each other crazy. She said they learned to be sensitive to each others’ moods and needs and to give each other elbow room, but also to show affection and empathy frequently.

Zhang Weiwei, professor of international relations at Fudan University in Shanghai, wrote that China is a successful meritocracy with little to learn from the U.S. model. Almost all the members of the Politburo Standing Committee, China’s highest governing body, have proved themselves as governors of Chinese provinces, many of which are larger than European nations. Nobody as incompetent as George W. Bush or Japan’s Yoshihoko Noda could rise to the top in China, he wrote.

Henry Farrell wrote that Europe’s politics is as dysfunctional as U.S. politics, and for the same reason. Governments and corporations are so entangled that governments don’t respond to voters and business is not subject to the discipline of the market. Any hope of change comes from protest movements operating outside what he called the “formal” democratic process.

Ezra Klein of the Washington Post described Health Quality Partners, an experimental program under Medicare for helping elderly people with acute illnesses. It has reduced hospitalizations by 33 percent and cut Medicare costs by 22 percent, simply by having a nurse go around on a regular basis and check up on how patients are doing and whether they are following doctors’ orders. But there is a problem: It reduces the profitability of hospitals.

A writer for Vice magazine found a new example of a familiar pattern as he reported on efforts of French troops and their Nigerian allies to pacify the African nation of Mali. They can win battles, but they can’t compel the obedience of the population, and so the local version of Al Qaeda grows strong.

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If you find any of these articles of interest, you might want to click on the links in my Interesting reading menu.

The trouble with globalization is that there aren’t any democratic global institutions.

The only global institutions are multinational corporations, international banks and international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization that serve the interests of corporations and banks.

During ancient and medieval times, political philosophers believed that democracy was something that could work only on a local level. They thought a town or city-state could be democratic, but not a large nation. And it is true that it is hard to make democracy work when you go above the level of the New England town meeting. But our existing international institutions and organizations don’t even attempt to be democratic.

President Barack Obama spoke with his usual eloquence in Cairo on June 4, 2009, about the relationship of the United States to the Muslim world.

His statements about democracy in the Middle East began at about the 35th minute. Here is what I take to be the key passage.

America does not presume to know what is best for everyone, just as we would not presume to pick the outcome of a peaceful election. But I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. These are not just American ideas; they are human rights. And that is why we will support them everywhere.

Now, there is no straight line to realize this promise. But this much is clear: Governments that protect these rights are ultimately more stable, successful and secure. Suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. America respects the right of all peaceful and law-abiding voices to be heard around the world, even if we disagree with them. And we will welcome all elected, peaceful governments — provided they govern with respect for all their people.

The United States democratic process is dysfunctional. Big money dominates the electoral and legislative processes. Gerrymandering protects legislative and congressional incumbents. A two-party consensus deprives voters of meaningful choice on many issues. Many Americans feel government does not represent them.

A sociologist named Erik Olin Wright has a possible solution. In his book Envisioning Real Utopias (2010), he proposes supplementing democracy with randomocracy – government by people selected at random, like juries.

This would solve a number of problems. It would solve the problem of control of the electoral process by monied interests. Philosophers through the ages have said that the person most trustworthy to hold power is the person who doesn’t seek power; random selection would be better than voting for this purpose. Many groups don’t feel represented in our present process. Randomocracy would give members of every group equal opportunity to share power.

Raandom selection would not produce leaders of superior wisdom and virtue, but does anybody think our existing system does? Maybe average wisdom and virtue would be an improvement.

Wright cited a randomly-selected Citizens Assembly created by the provincial government of British Colombia in 2003 to formulate a referendum proposal for a new electoral system for the provincial parliament. The idea was that members of the existing parliament had too much of a personal stake in the decision to make an impartial decision, or to select decision-makers, and, if you elected a panel, that would recreate the same problem.

The Citizens Assembly consisted of one man and one woman from each of the province’s electoral districts, plus two “First Nations” representatives – 160 in all. They met in Vancouver every other weekend during the spring of 2004 for lectures, seminars and discussions about alternative systems. They received $150 for each weekend’s expenses. Then they participated in a serious of town hall meeting around the province throughout the summer.

In the fall, they met again in Vancouver and formulated a proposal – a complicated system called Single Transferable Voting. The proposal was submitted on referendum, and was defeated. It got more than 57 percent of the vote, but 60 percent was necessary to pass. Nevertheless Wright thinks the British Colombia Citizens Assembly was successful as a process, and could be applied to many different kinds of issues.

Where a state, provincial or national government has two legislative houses, one could be selected by a random process, Wright said. This would require (1) a process that assured representation by all significant demographic groups, (2) compensation sufficient that most citizens would agree to participate and (3) a strong professional and technical staff to provide enough information for an informed decision.